The Problem With U.s. Campaign Watchdog: It's A Political Animal

White House, Congress Prefer A Weak Fec

November 17, 1996|By Mary Jacoby, Washington Bureau.

WASHINGTON — Former Federal Election Commissioner Trevor Potter is a Republican, so it raised eyebrows two years ago when he cast the deciding vote to sue a political committee headed by GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Partisan deadlock on important cases is common with the commission, which is charged with policing campaigns and has a six-member governing board split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.

"Going in, I only intended to serve one term. That meant that I felt able to vote without regard to whether a vote was going to be popular or not," said Potter, who resigned last year to return to private practice.

It's difficult to vote against members of Congress "who are going to decide whether you keep your job or not," he added.

A campaign finance controversy in the last weeks of the presidential campaign and a sense that post-Watergate campaign finance reform has failed have prompted both parties to call again for a serious effort to fix the system.

Some reformers complain that the FEC--the official campaign finance watchdog--has no teeth. Further, they contend that the commission's history proves that politicians have never really wanted a strong enforcement agency, mainly because they are the targets.

"As far as the administration is concerned, a weak FEC is fine with them, as it is with the Congress," said Lisa Rosenberg, director of FEC Watch, which monitors the intersection of campaign money and politics. Not isolating the commission from political influence "was absolutely part of Congress' design" to defang the FEC, she said.

Adding impetus to the need for campaign finance reform is the millions of dollars spent to influence elections by the Christian Coalition, labor unions and other groups, which are not required to disclose their spending.

In the controversy that emerged at the end of the presidential campaign, Democratic National Committee fundraiser John Huang was discovered to have improperly solicited hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign contributions. Huang was suspended from his post last month, and Republicans have vowed congressional hearings into his activities.

Congress set up the FEC in 1974, giving itself the right to set its budget and to control selection of its commissioners.

Its birth came in the wake of revelations that corporations had made hundreds of thousands of illegal donations to a secret slush fund controlled by President Richard Nixon.

The commission's mandate was to clean up campaigns, ensure that candidates disclose the money they raise and spend, and discipline them when they don't.

The reality, however, is that political committees have found increasingly ingenious ways to circumvent disclosure. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, Congress has hindered the FEC's ability to investigate and punish rule breakers, watchdog groups say.

Punishment, if it comes at all, is usually years after the fact. The time lag "encourages people to play a little more fast and loose with the law than if there were swift justice," said Rosenberg of FEC Watch.

"I don't find anybody saying, `I'll evade the law now' " and pay later, Elliot said. But, she said, the system for resolving complaints "is much too slow." One solution, Elliot said, is to increase the agency's $28 million annual budget so it can hire more staff.

For many years Congress did not allow the commission to hire professional investigators. The commission now has two investigators, hired in 1993. The extra help has not been enough to prevent the FEC from dumping hundreds of cases.

In 1979, Congress stripped the election commission of the authority to conduct random audits of campaigns. The move came after several senior members of Congress suffered through the audits.

"Congress didn't like it. They felt it was unfair (to conduct audits) when there was no indication of them doing anything wrong," said Washington election lawyer Kenneth Gross, who oversaw the random audit program.

One of the lawmakers audited in the late 1970s was Rep. Bob Livingston, then an obscure junior Republican from Louisiana. By 1995, he had risen to chairmanship of the House Appropriations Committee.

A close ally of Gingrich, Livingston ferociously attacked the commission last year, moving to restrict its budget and cut the staff in its press office. Privately, many at the commission saw his actions as retribution for the GOPAC lawsuit, which went forward as a result of Trevor Potter's vote.

Gingrich's political committee was the vehicle by which the future speaker raised money in the 1980s to train a Republican farm team of state legislators who went on to run for Congress.

GOPAC is widely credited as one of the reasons Republicans were able to win control of Congress in 1994.

The commission alleged GOPAC should have disclosed the money it raised, but GOPAC argued it was not spending money on federal campaigns and therefore did not have to report its finances.

In a watershed case for the FEC, a federal judge agreed with GOPAC and threw out the commission's lawsuit earlier this year.

At the FEC, it was seen as no coincidence that Livingston ordered an Appropriations Committee investigation of the agency.

Congressional leaders, meanwhile, have pledged to work with President Clinton to enact campaign reform in the next Congress. But there are no firm plans to directly address the commission's basic structural problems, congressional aides say.